Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (5*)

You CAN teach an old dog new tricks, or at least a belated recognition of an art form that booted up long after my non-digital childhood.  HBO's enjoyable, even moving The Last of Us already had chipped away at my stubborn resistance but Gabrielle Zevin did the impossible with her feminist Trojan horse: this old Scrabble-loving Luddite may actually begin exploring Apple One's games thanks to her storytelling skill and generosity of spirit!

Zevin manages to draw the through line from Shakespeare to the world she inhabits despite this reader's limitation of not recognizing a single title in a game library that suddenly seems to rival Alexandria's now that I'm finally paying attention.  References to classical literature also abound, but none of this scaffolding would matter if she didn't ground Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow in a "will-they or won't they?" love story between gamers Hannah and Sam, set mostly in Boston and Los Angeles, both of which Zevin vividly renders in 3D prose.  And while I'm completely ignorant of game structure, I'm pretty certain she has mastered the text-only equivalent with seemingly random narrative references that open portals to other worlds, zooming in on the past and present of her incredibly diverse characters, who each contain multitudes.  They include the world's kindest NPC, hardworking immigrants, a Beverly Hills grandma, a Korean game-show hostess, cis-gender gay nerds, a Japanese textile designer and an, adulterous Israeli professor into BDSM who is more flawed than monstrous.  Here's the bad and good of Dov, the latter:

“Why would I care? They’re all identical. They all can suck my dick. And I mean that literally. You have to make whatever programming language you use suck your dick. It needs to serve you.” Dov looked over at Hannah. “You don’t have a dick, so clit, whatever. Pick the programming language that is going to make you come.”

*  *  *  *  *

You aren’t just a gamer when you play anymore. You’re a builder of worlds, and if you’re a builder of worlds, your feelings are not as important as what your gamers are feeling. You must imagine them at all times. There is no artist more empathetic than the game designer.” 

Zevin's slyly funny, too:

Sam knew the foot was gone. He could see it was gone. He knew what he was experiencing was a basic error in programming, and he wished he could open up his brain and delete the bad code. Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.

And then there's her omniscient wisdom.

The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.